Saturday, February 1, 2014

I am more shocked than you are that I've managed to post again so soon. Having made it through my first term, there is suddenly time to take photos and look at blogs and do all those long forgotten, fun and time wasting things that I used to enjoy so much. I am taking advantage of the time to share some of my print work with you (especially the Canadians who can't see it otherwise!)

Going into print, I thought that i was not going to enjoy it all. I thought that it was going to be too technical and precise...perhaps I should have been more precise, but my favourite results came from the smudges and mistakes.

I exposed 3 different screen designs in the end, and layerd print over print until I was happy with a sample. It was lovely to be able to work by eye and not have to plan everything in advance...I never do well with planning.

Above and below are devore samples. I really enjoyed devore and loved the effect that it created (although the pastes I mixed were always a bit grainy and lumpy). Devore works by burning away part of a fabric. It must be used on a fabric that is a blend of fibres so that when the cellulose is burnt away something structural remains. May not be explaining that perfectly, but hopefully you get the gist. There are see-through bits in the end and that is super exciting!

I also became massively carried away using little circular stencils, overlapping different colours of circles...well, the possibilities are just endless!

The very white bits (and light colours) are made with discharge paste. Sounds a bit icky, but it was very fun. It bleached the fabric and made delicate, soft colours (which I obviously love!) These were great to print on top of too. I did have a couple of disasters, however, where the paste was left on too long and the bleach burnt huge holes in samples, eeek!

Just a couple of my favourite sketchbook pages.

I've decided that I'll leave you with some of my favourite Falmouth shots at the end of each post. The scary woman bust above is outside of a lovely sea food restaurant that I can't wait to visit (bibs provided!) and below, the lovely harbour. I could stare at this scene all day; it's always different and always interesting!